(from a 23 September 2025 conversation)
Better Remote Facilitation
Difficult Meetings
Circles and Soup is a great exercise for teams struggling with agency. This exercise (and variations) can get them out of the groan zone:
Sustainable Pace
We all need more of this!
Random Remote Topics
That may still be useful.
Useful Books for the Remote Facilitator
Kirsten and Jay-Allen wrote the book I was considering writing next. It is brilliant and will allow you to inspect-and-adapt your online facilitation.
The original Agile Retrospectives book shaped much of my thinking about facilitation and helped me adjust my thinking for facilitating online. In the second edition, my friend David Horowitz, joins Esther and Diana in adding those nuances for remote facilitation. I’m grateful to all of them for this book.
A funny story: When Johanna and I were writing the first draft of this book, it was twice it’s current size. We had to make it smaller. So we cut out most of the facilitation parts. That was going to be the second book until the Remote Facilitators’ Pocket Guide came out. It was so good, I didn’t have the heart to compete with it. I truly valued their book.
However, Chapters 1-9 in From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams still has some elements that will help remote facilitators think about their collaboration space.